Current trends at the national level in the United States, including the aging of the general population and the impact of the passage of the Affordable Care Act, are driving significant changes across all healthcare venues. Conventional models of care delivery emphasize hospitals as central to healthcare. Unfortunately, due to the nature of hospital systems under conventional models, there is often a large variance in treatments, prescriptions, and outcomes, and customer service is not a priority. Thus, under the current trends in the hospital setting, increased complexity and acuity of patient needs coupled with shorter stays and higher patient expectations result in a significant demand for reconfiguration of bedside care delivery to advance coordination of care. However, an ongoing shortage of highly trained nurses and other medical professionals, new and challenging financial incentive models, and inefficient conventional staffing models represent significant practical difficulties in initiating positive change.
A shortage of medical professionals remains an ongoing problem in care delivery in the United States. Changing demographics, both in terms of the expansion of the number of aged patients with complex needs and the aging of the experience nursing workforce, contributes to a disturbing nursing shortage in the United States, with the shortage of advanced practice and nurse leaders even more severe. Currently, the United States healthcare system is short over 40,000 nurses and 63,000 physicians with even greater shortages on the horizon if this trend continues. By 2020, there will be a shortage of 91,500 physicians and 340,000 nurses. These shortage trends result in increased staff stress due to insufficient coverage and extended overtime hours. Many hospital nurses report an erosion of the collaborative relationship with other care team members as well as major barrier to the quality of patient care through their compromised ability to detect, prevent, and/or address complications in a timely manner.
Additionally, a majority of patients encounter various challenges in accessing and receiving healthcare. Approximately 56 million Americans live in rural areas with inadequate access to primary healthcare. Of those that have access to healthcare, approximately 33% of patients reported problems in accessing and receiving care from their primary care physician, and approximately 73% of patients have difficulty making timely appointments, receiving phone advice, or receiving after-hours care. Further exacerbating these challenges, many physician office and emergency room visits are unnecessary. There are 120 million emergency room visits per year, with approximately 64% being non-emergency visits requiring only basic medical services. The total cost per year of unnecessary physician office and emergency room visits is nearly 31 billion dollars. Under the current model of healthcare delivery, this amount will only continue to grow with an expected 31 million additional patients in the United States by the end of 2014.
A healthcare delivery model is needed that addresses patient care quality issues, inpatient coordination issues, interdisciplinary relationships and communication issues, shortages of healthcare professionals, rising healthcare costs, continuum and coordination of care issues, 30 day readmissions, inpatient chaos, and the like. It is with these observations in mind, among others, that various aspects of the present disclosure were conceived and developed.